Spectres of 1919: Class and Nation in the Making of the New Negro

1. The New Negro and the Left

1 1 The New Negro and the Left This is an era of war and revolution, of struggle and revision, of contest and change. —Masthead, Modernist, 1919 Writing in The New Negro in 1925, Alain Locke was purportedly describing a self-evident state of affairs when he proclaimed that the “deep feeling of race” currently being manifested as the “mainspring of Negro life” is “radical in tone, but not in purpose” and that “only the most stupid forms of opposition, misunderstanding or persecution could make it otherwise.” Although, Locke conceded, “the thinking Negro has shifted a little toward the left with the world-trend, and there is an increasing group who affiliate with radical and liberal movements,” at present “the Negro is radical on race matters, conservative on others, in other words, a ‘forced radical,’ a social protestant rather than a genuine radical.” The “Negro mind”—a unitary phenomenon for which Locke presumably felt privileged to speak—“reaches out as yet to nothing but American wants, American ideas.” Even the Negro’s attempt to “build his Americanism on race values,” while a “unique social experiment,” entailed “no limitation or reservation with respect to American life.” It actually constituted a realization of Americanism: “Democracy itself is obstructed and stagnated to the extent that any of its channels are closed. . . . So the choice is not between one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the other.” By “now becom[ing] a conscious contributor and lay[ing] aside the status of a beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and partic- 2 Spectres of 1919 ipant in American civilization,” the New Negro accomplished, for Locke, two things: he or she moved beyond “the arid fields of controversy and debate”—presumably in large part over political and economic questions —and toward “the productive fields of creative expression.” The zone of culture—where “race values” would be explored in the spirit of pluralism, not separatism—thus supplied an antidote to the radicalism that might otherwise move from “tone” to “purpose.” The culturalist project embodied in The New Negro was indissolubly linked with both antiradicalism and American nationalism.1 Beneath its bravado, however, Locke’s formulation of the New Negro movement rested on somewhat unsteady underpinnings. His admission that “an increasing group . . . affiliate with radical and liberal movements ” hardly squared with his assertion that this affiliation was not to be taken seriously. Moreover, there was a veiled threat in Locke’s assertion that “Harlem’s quixotic radicalisms call for their ounce of democracy to-day lest to-morrow they be beyond cure.” As Anthony Dawahare reads between Locke’s lines, “U.S. political and economic rulers must legally recognize the rights of blacks to be offered what American capitalism has to offer, or else they may face some form of revolution.” Nonetheless , Locke’s normative definition of the New Negro movement as above all a cultural movement, simultaneously Negro nationalist and American nationalist, has been taken as not canon-forming but canonical by many of the literary critics and cultural historians commenting on the New Negro movement/Harlem Renaissance. From John Hope Franklin’s 1947 assertion that “the writers of the Harlem Renaissance . . . gave little attention to the propaganda of the socialists and communists” to the more recent absence of New Negro leftism in accounts by Ann Douglas, Steven Watson, Mark Helbling, Michael North, and J. Martin Favor, most investigations of the movement have reduced its radical critique —when it is mentioned at all—to postwar militancy. After a brief nod to African American self-defense in the 1919 race riots and a perfunctory citation of Claude McKay’s “If We Must Die,” these accounts usually move rapidly from the assertion of a new selfhood in the zone of the streets to the articulation of a new discursive practice in the zone of representation . Chidi Ikonné and Robert Bone, who emphasize the movement ’s engagements with primitivism and pastoralism, relegate any consideration of radical politics to the margins. Even the canon-challenging studies of women Harlem Renaissance writers by Cheryl Wall, Gloria Hull, and Claudia Tate, which have reconfigured the gendered lineaments of the movement in significant ways, remain silent about the left-wing sympathies of the important African American women writers they treat. The...